Chris Patten is one of the UK’s leading foreign affairs figures. To my sadness, and despite the best efforts of Chatham House, Britain doesn’t really have much of an academic/expert foreign affairs community in the American style. Hilary Clinton’s predecessor, Condoleezza Rice was an accomplished foreign affairs academic before entering the world of politics, completing her PhD in her 20s on Czech politics in the Soviet era. That she ended up directing US foreign policy, showed a willingness to have experts leading the external affairs policy and implementation of a government, and this policy was continued by Obama when he appointed Dr. Susan Rice as UN Ambassador, who carried out her doctoral studies in Oxford, and who’s dissertation was entitled “Commonwealth Initiative in Zimbabwe”.

Contrast this with the UK, where major appointments at ambassador level are career civil-servants, and where ministers who fill the ranks of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office often have close to zero experience on the world stage, let alone doctorates in international studies. Chris Patten is an exception. After 13 years in Parliament, he took to foreign affairs, taking over the role of governor of Hong Kong from 1992 until the colonial outpost was handed back to China in 1997. Since then he has become something of a foreign affairs academic, as well as an important figure in European foreign policy (having served as Commissioner for External Affairs for four years), and has written several books on Asia, British relations with America and on the changing landscape in foreign affairs.

The Guardian is carrying an interview with Lord Patten today, marking his visit to Gaza. He makes some interesting points, and reading the interview I am baffled as to why William Hague, a man with little foreign affairs experience and not much gravitas in the world (although he is highly educated, with an MBA from much-respected INSEAD in Paris as well as serving a stint at one of the world’s leading management consultancies), is our Foreign Secretary when Patten himself is a Conservative peer. If the world is to tackle and finally resolve the problems in the Levant, we need to be bold and put an end to this idea that we can simply isolate Gaza and allow Israel to continue the status-quo on the ground. It seems Lord Patten agrees, and he thinks Europe and European countries shouldn’t just wait around for America to fix the problem:

“The default European position should not be to wait to find out what the Americans are going to do, and if the Americans don’t do anything to wring our hands. We should be prepared to be more explicit in setting out Europe’s objectives and doing more to try to implement them.”

Patten went on to specifically criticise Israel’s Gaza blockade:

Patten, who found it “easier to get into a maximum security prison in the UK than to enter Gaza”, said Israel’s relaxation of its blockade had not gone far enough. “It’s moved from about minus 10 to about minus eight. It doesn’t do anything to help restore economic activity in Gaza.

And something you would hardly ever hear a leading Western politician saying, that the blockade of Gaza might not have anything to do with security but more to do with punishing Gazans and punishing Hamas:

“It’s difficult to understand what preventing exports has to do with security. It has everything to do with the view that Gaza should be collectively punished to discredit Hamas. Unfortunately there are some centuries, if not millennia, of history that show that does not work. Presumably the international community as well as Israel wants at some stage – sooner rather than later – to be able to persuade Gaza and its political leadership to take a course which will lead to reconciliation and peace and stability. It’s difficult to know how you accomplish that if you deny the people of Gaza any social or economic progress.”

Perhaps over the next few years we will start to see more of an effort to actually sit down and talk to Hamas leaders. The world made a very big strategic mistake after the 2006 elections which resulted with a Hamas leader of Palestine. To dismiss the result of a democratic election, no matter how unsavoury that result, was an insult to everybody in the Palestinian territories. Israel, Europe & America should have sought ways to engage with this group and try to bring them into the fold of moderate statesmanship. The only way the long-standing dispute in Northern Ireland was solved was to sit down with people on all sides. As Patten says:

“You don’t always agree with people you talk to – indeed sometimes you find them despicable – but you need to ease them out of the corners into which they’ve painted themselves rather than lay on the paint much thicker.”

And he goes on to explain how isolating Hamas & Gaza may be counter-productive in the medium-long term anyway:

“I think it’s wholly reasonable to say we couldn’t deal with Hamas unless they agreed to a comprehensive and complete ceasefire. But do we need to insist on them accepting all past agreements? Has Israel accepted all past agreements? If you simply isolate them, do you weaken them? You strengthen people who are even more extreme than they are”.